Archive for the 'Web x.0' Category

The next 5000 days of the Web

Published by Ben Kepes on August 14, 2008 in Design, IT, Society and Web x.0. 2 Comments

Check out the presentation by Kevin Kelly last year to TED where he talks about his vision for the next 5000 days of the web culminating in what he terms "The One" an all encompassing world machine.

His predictions;

  • There is only one machine
  • The Web is its OS
  • All screens look into the one
  • No bits will live outside the Web
  • To share is to gain
  • Let The One read it
  • The One is us
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Play nicely please children…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 13, 2008 in Business, IT and Web x.0. 1 Comment

First some background. TechCrunch50 is a conference where web start-ups can pitch their wares to an influential bunch of silicon valley A listers (and lots of hangers-on). DEMO is a similarly focused conference. Apparently there is little love lost between the two conferences due to some conflicting scheduling (and me thinks due largely to hyper-inflated silicon valley egos coming into play).

It seems that one of the TechCrunch50 people posted an article about the ten most important things for an entrepreneur to know. So far so good.

Now it gets murky - one of the DEMO organisers wrote to the TechCrunch50 organisers questioning the origins of the article and claiming that much of it was lifted from an old article written by then. Note that the email sent to TC50 was private, wasn’t accusatory but merely questioned the origins of the material.

TC50 then posted the email in full, for all the world to see and jumped up on its high horse claiming shock and horror at the allegations (which TC50 would seem to liken to allegations of war crimes given their reaction).

So here are my thoughts, with a particularly pragmatic Kiwi perspective….

  • The article was 10 tips for entrepreneurs, not War and Peace. The ideas espoused are pretty obvious, DEMO should relax a little
  • That said, unattributed copying of published material is a bad look
  • TechCrunch50, by publishing the email, was making mountains out of molehills - a simple reply to the email, in private, would have sufficed
  • Judging by the number of comments on the TC50 people are getting really excited about this (which is why, I surmise, TC50 posted it - to gain a bit more exposure)
  • The two parties should be taken to a dark room and told to stand in the corner until they can play nicely

Grow up guys - both of these conferences are there to help web start-ups - focus more on that and less on your own egos!

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Now that’s a refreshing change

Published by Ben Kepes on August 13, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Design, IT, SocialMedia and Web x.0. 0 Comments

I go to the odd commercial conference and they all tend to have a slick veneer but underneath they’re money making enterprises (after all most conferences are organised by self-serving professional conference companies).

of2conlogo

I’m heading over to Office 2.0 in San Francisco in a couple of week and it was awesome to read Rafe’s post about the event. Turns out organiser Ismael Ghalimi does it for all the right reasons - it doesn’t make money (other than the status he obtains from putting on the event) but it’s truly an experiment in self-propelled collectivism.

Previous conferences I’ve been to have declared themselves to be on the wave of the shifting paradigm, embracing the web, collaboration et al. Most do nothing to put this claim into action - being instead mired in tons of paper, low connectivity, commercial plugs and the like - I’m looking forward to experiencing another way of doing things.

Click here for a discounted registration fee. (Oh and there’s a free ultra portable for each attendee - W00T!)

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On Gmail and downtime

Published by Ben Kepes on August 12, 2008 in Business, IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 1 Comment

I’m not going to say too much about the Gmail outage that occurred this morning - it’s been the talk of the blogosphere, twitterverse and Group mailing lists. It’s pretty much been said before.

I will remind those who use the outage to point out that SaaS is inherently flawed as a concept, that hard drives with Outlook .pst files get fried and that Exchange sometimes fails.

Sure Google need to do some explaining, look at their systems and finally accept that they’ll have to come around and offer more support than just groups, but none of that does anything to negate the fact that on-demand, web based email offers significant benefits to users.

That’s it - I’ll leave the rest to all the other commentators!

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